The Spiritualist newspaper > No.136, April 2nd 1875

THE SPIRITUALIST.
159
April 2, 1875.
is a case, which has been going on in the midst of us for forty
years, and is still going on; it has been published to the
world for many years; yet a warm discussion is carried on by
eminent men as to the fact of whether prayer is or is not
answered, and not one of them exhibits the least knowledge of
this most pertinent and illustrative phenomenon! The
Spiritualist explains all this as a personal influence. The per¬
fect simplicity, faith, boundless charity, and goodness of
George Muller have enlisted in his cause beings of a like
nature; and his mediumistic powers have enabled them to
work for him by influencing others to send him money, food,
clothes, &c., all arriving, as we should say, just in the nick of
time. The numerous letters he received with these gifts,
describing the sudden and uncontrollable impulse the donors
felt to send him a certain definite sum at a certain fixed time,
such being the exact sum he was in want of, and had prayed
for, strikingly illustrates the nature of the power at work.
All this might be explained away if it were partial and dis¬
continuous ; but when it continued to supply the daily wants
of a life of unexampled charity, for which no provision in
advance was ever made (for that Muller considered would
show want of trust in God), no such explanation can cover the
facts.
The argument might be pushed further than Mr.
Wallace has done in this paragraph, wherein he assumes
that <c medial power ” may sometimes be absent when
prayer should be answered. In Spiritualism there is much
evidence of the truth of Swedenborg’s statement, that
the thoughts of all people are connected with the spirit
world, and that good and evil thoughts are synchronously
shared—usually unconsciously—by vast numbers of
spirits and mortals, so that all men are mediums.
| gWhen a man aspires for that which is pure, and true,
and loving, he probably places himself in harmony with
higher spirits and leaves a greater gulf between himself
and the hells, consequently leads a much better and
happier life than those who never have recourse to
prayer. Aspiration is usually followed by inspiration,
and true prayer may be defined as aspiration, so that a
man by act, and thought, may pass his whole life in
prayer, yet never go down on his knees, never enter a
church, and never utter a word of supplication. As the
king says in Hamlet:—
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Savages and some civilised men pray to the spirits of
particular departed mortals; we know one medium who
is sometimes plagued by bad spirits, and who prays to
Socrates, of whom he is a great admirer; the plan is
lisually efficacious, the evil influences depart and good
ones flow in, probably because by the act of prayer he
raises himself out of the sphere of bad spirits. There
is evidence in Spiritualism that prayer is good for all
men, whether medial power in the ordinary sense of the
word be present or not.
On page 229 Mr. Wallace quotes from The Spiritual
Magazine a valuable passage, because of the additional
light it throws upon the influence of the mind of the
medium upon manifestations. The statement is made
by Dr. F. L. H. Willis, professor of Materia Medica in
the New York Medical College, as follows :—
THE INFLUENCE OF THE MIND OF THE MEDIUM UPON
MANIFESTATIONS.
One evening the medium went into the dark room alone,
and took her seat at the piano. I was in the sitting-room
adjoining (the door between was open), the light from which
made every object in the circle-room distinctly visible.
Scarcely had the medium struck the first note upon the piano,
when the tambourine and the bells seemed to leap from the floor
and join in unison. Carefully and noiselessly I stole into the
room, and for several seconds it was my privilege to witness a
rare and wonderful sight. I saw the bells and tambourine in
motion. I saw the bells lifted as by invisible hands and
chimed, each in its turn, accurately and beautifully with the
piano. I saw the tambourine dexterously and scientifically I
manipulated with no mortal hand -near it. But suddenly,
by a slight turn of the head, the medium became aware of my
presence; instantly, like the severing of the connection
between a galvanic battery and its poles, everything ceased.
Mark this ; so long as my presence in the room was known
only to the invisibles, so long the manifestations continued in
perfection; the moment the medium became aware of it,
everything stopped. A wave of mental emotion passed over
her mind, which was in itself sufficient to stop the phenomena
at once. The incident proved to my mind most clearly that,
in most cases, it is the condition of the medium that renders
it so difficult for spirits to perform these wonders in the light,
rather than any lack of power or disposition on their part.
When there is a lack of “ harmony ” at spirit circles
the spirits are probably not directly affected thereby,
but their instrument, the medium, being in a state of
timidity or distrust they cannot act so well, a calm,
happy state of the nervous and mental system of the
medium being desirable. When a medium is agitated
by passion, not by anxiety, spirits with physical power
have more scope than at other times, for that state of
mind, as we have seen on more than one occasion, per¬
mits the veriest fiends to run riot; it is the very reverse
condition to that in which a medium may place himself
by prayer. Perhaps in Dr. Willis's case, the spirits, as
well as the medium, did not know he was there ; they
may possibly have been able to get the information
only through the consciousness of the medium. In the
case of the outrage at Miss Cook’s circle, the medium
had no suspicion of foul play, neither had the spirits,
so the*manifestations went on very well, showing that
what information the spirits could get in that particular
case, could only have reached them through the con¬
sciousness of the medium. We have known unjust
suspicions on the part of mediums to react on the
utterances of spirits.
Mr. Wallace’s book offers few loopholes for criticism;
we can only speak of it in terms of almost unqualified
praise, so will conclude this notice by quoting a few of
his own experiences:—
MB. WALLACE’S EXPERIMENTS IN MSSMBBISM.
My earliest experiences on any of the matters treated of
in this little work were in 1844, at which time I was teaching
in a school in one of the Midland counties. Mr. Spencer Hall
was then lecturing on Mesmerism, and visited our town, and 1
and many of my pupils attended. We were all greatly inte¬
rested. Some of the elder boys tried to mesmerise the younger
ones, and succeeded; and I myself found several who, under
my influence, exhibited many of the most curious phenomena
we had witnessed at the lecture. I was intensely interested
in the subject, and pursued it with ardour, carrying out a
number of experiments to guard against deception and to test
the nature of the influence. Many of the details of these
experiments are now stamped as vividly on my memory as if
they were events of yesterday, and I will briefly give the sub¬
stance of a few of the more remarkable.
I produced the trance state in two or three boys, of twelve
to sixteen years of age, with great ease, and could always be
sure that it was genuine, first, by the turning of the eyeball in
the orbit, so that the pupil was not visible when the eyelid
was raised; secondly, by the characteristic change of counte¬
nance ; and, thirdly, by the readiness with which I could pro¬
duce catalepsy and loss of sensation in any part of the body.
The most remarkable observations during this state were on
phreno-mesmerism and sympathetic sensation. By placing my
finger on the part of the head corresponding to any given phre¬
nological organ, the corresponding faculty was manifested with
wonderful and amusing perfection. For a long time I thought
that the effects produced on the patient were caused by my
wishing the particular manifestation; but I found by accident
that when, by ignorance of the position of the organs, I placed
my finger on a wrong part, the manifestation which followed
was not that which I expected, but that which was due to the
position touched. I was particularly interested in phenomena
of this kind, and by experiments, made alone and silently,
completely satisfied myself that the effects were not due to
suggestion or to the influence of my own mind. I had to buy